I began this investigation into CieAura by saying that my main concern with this product was the science that is claimed to make it work. As I researched deeper, however, I realised that, like a lot of other people, I’d been hoodwinked by CieAura. The people behind this enterprise don’t care if their product has any basis in science. I don’t think they don’t even care what their product is. There are much larger subterfuges at work here.

For a start, it’s pretty difficult to accept that CieAura are unaware of the many levels of deception they use in the promotion of their business. Try as I might to believe that they misguidedly think that they’re being genuine about what they’re doing, there is so much obfuscation, sidestepping, misdirection and just plain fibbing on their website and in their marketing strategies, that it’s hard to cut them much slack as ‘honest folks just having a go’. The first indication of duplicity is the robust and persistent disclaimer that appears under every hyperbolic pitch of every CieAura modality:

“NOTE: CieAura products are sold for learning, self-improvement and simple relaxation. No statement contained in this writing, and no information provided by any CieAura employee or retailer, should be construed as a claim or representation that these products are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease or any other medical condition. The information contained in this writing is deemed to be based on reliable and authoritative report. However, certain persons considered experts may disagree with one or more of the statements contained here. CieAura assumes no liability or risk involved in the use of the products described here. We make no warranty, expressed or implied, other than that the material conforms to applicable standard specifications.”

Wow. A simpler way of putting that might have been “We make no claim that our product actually does any of the things that we’re making you think it does”. That’s not the only disclaimer either – there are frequent secondary waivers scattered throughout the site:(i)

These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease or illness. If you have a pre-existing condition, please check with your healthcare provider before using.

Despite the detailed legal ducking and weaving, it’s quite plain that CieAura intends you to have the impression that their holograms will have beneficial effects on medical conditions. A few little excerpts from the various product pages:

Vague promises, to be sure, but given the contexts in which each of these statements is placed (which you can read by clicking on each of them, above), it’s pretty clear how CieAura is being promoted. And did you see the really weaselly line in the disclaimer? (I mean, it’s ALL weaselly, but this is particularly good):

…no information provided by any CieAura employee or retailer should be construed as a claim or representation that these products are intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease or any other medical condition.

This effectively means that anyone spruiking CieAura can say the product achieves whatever miraculous results they like and, very conveniently, CieAura can avoid taking responsibility for those claims. Liability is deftly passed onto anyone who happens to be selling the things (which you will see in just a minute is germane to the whole operation). The disclaimers, like the CieAura chips themselves, are completely void of any value.

Delving deeper into the CieAura site, there’s no shortage of other slippery efforts to bolster up the apparent bonafides of the operation. There is, for example, an impressive-sounding ‘Medical Advisory Board‘ for CieAura. Impressive unless you take a few minutes to investigate them. Of the six people featured, three are chiropractors, one is an osteopath and the other two are general practitioners. I don’t need to tell you that chiropractors and osteopaths are hardly the epitome of reliable medical advice. And I’m sorry, as much as I respect GPs, a couple of them endorsing a radical new approach to medicine that completely rewrites the way we understand the physics of the universe doesn’t hold much water for me.

Elsewhere on the web, in a YouTube video which is presumably aimed at pitching CieAura to prospective marketers, Paul Rogers claims that there is a ‘peer-reviewed study’ behind CieAura. He’s obviously heard the term ‘peer-review’, knows it’s something that a credible scientifically based product should have, and thinks it applies to this kind of crap [pdf]. It doesn’t.(ii)

I won’t bore you with more examples of the many instances of perfidiousness to be found here. Whatever the case, it really does not matter that the CieAura chips are nothing more than shiny decals with no mechanism of known efficacy and a lack of proper substantiation. The product itself is just sleight-of-hand. Its primary purpose is not to be sold to an end user.

Remember how I encouraged you to take note of the pyramid logo on the CieAura hologram? Well that, my friends, is quite a fitting emblem for this company, for they are the very model of a pyramid scheme.(iii) In the post before last, I mentioned Brian J, who left a comment on one of the ShooTag articles way back in June 2011. This is what he said:

I was at a presentation last night by a company named CieAura. They use the same technology as the shootag (so they say) and I was wondering what you have heard about them? They claim $80 million in sales this year and say that they will double next year.

I was thinking of become a distributor with them, but like I said, since they claim their method is the same as shootag, I was wondering what you thought?

The presentation that Brian attended wasn’t about trying to sell him CieAura chips for his personal use. It was designed to sell him on CieAura as a business opportunity that would make him some money. And indeed, in order to help convince Brian how wonderful CieAura was, they even tried out the old balance trick on him – with which he was impressed until I told him how it was done.(iv) Fortunately for Brian, he was warned off this swindle before they got his cash:

To sign up for their program was about a minimum $500 purchase, so I am REALLY glad I did not do it now.

And by the way, thanks for not making me feel bad. Your response was very kind. I know I am from a smaller town in Missouri, but when you look at the evidence as you have presented it, you feel like you should have known better.

You see how that works, right? To get in on the action of the miraculous CieAura, Brian has to fork out a base fee of $500 for a fistful of worthless glittery rainbow stickers. In the manner of all good pyramid schemes, that cool 500 goes to the next guy up the ladder, who’s paying off his franchise to the next guy up the ladder and so forth. Meanwhile, Brian has to sell off his wad of holograms to break even – which he realises very quickly is almost impossible, because outside the CieAura presentation room, no sensible person is going to take the useless things, even for free. No worries Brian! All you need to do is set up your own presentation event and rope in some more suckers! Only problem is, due to the laws of exponential mathematics, you eventually run out of suckers. CieAura, however, will not let you in on that little mathematical secret – they’ll tell you that you’re just not managing your dealership effectively… and attempt to sell you more useless crap.(v)

Because the product in this case is worth peanuts and has exactly NO efficacy, the only thing these people are really paying for is the privilege of using the CieAura name. And guess where most of the money in those $500+ advances comes to rest? Yup, that’s right, with Paul Rogers, Melissa Rogers and their cronies sitting there at the top of that pyramid (for a really excellent explanation of why a pyramid scheme is disastrous for everyone except the people at the top of the pyramid, go here).

Brian J had a lucky escape. Like most people who get involved in these scams he probably couldn’t afford to lose the $500 that CieAura was happily prepared to lift from him. And if Brian had not stumbled on Tetherd Cow, you can bet that they’d have eventually sucked a lot more out of him than $500 before he realised what was going on.

So you see why I believe the people peddling CieAura are despicable crooks. The dishonesty that stains the entire CieAura edifice speaks loudly against this being a decent and effective product. As I’ve said in previous discussions on TCA, honest people just don’t behave like these people do. There is simply no way on earth that you can set up a business like this and have no idea of what kind of racket you’re running. It makes me sincerely regret being foolish enough to occasionally feel a twinge of doubt about my negative assessment of the motives of Ms Rogers & co throughout the ShooTag saga: for most of the time I was challenging ShooTag, they were actively working the CieAura scam!

I want to finish off with a YouTube clip. You don’t need to watch it, because I’ll synopsise it for you. I only include it by way of proof, because I fear that if I merely told you about it you’d find it pretty hard to believe that anyone could actually be quite so lacking in basic decency.

It features Paul Rogers, CEO of CieAura, telling a Thanksgiving story. Don’t make the mistake of thinking it might reveal any shade of humanity in this man; it’s a tale about how he used the opportunity of a family Thanksgiving to inveigle (or more like browbeat, in fact) his closest relatives into the CieAura scheme.(vi) And certainly don’t go looking for any heart-warming epiphany here. I watched it right through – ever naive and optimistic – thinking that it might have some kind of revelatory and humble moral lesson; “..and in the end, I realised this was Thanksgiving, and the most important thing of all was that I had a loving family…”. But it’s not there. Paul Rogers is not that person. Even his close friends and family are, to him, just business opportunities.(vii)

Unfathomably, he seems to be completely oblivious as to how this video might seem to other people, since it’s publicly viewable on YouTube. Either that, or he doesn’t care. If you do choose to watch the clip, and you’re anything like me, you probably won’t get very far before you feel like throwing up.

Further reading:

PatchDiskBandScam has some comprehensive examination of CieAura as well as other health scams directly related to them, such as Lifewave, HarmonicFM and 8ight. There’s a great infographic showing the links between the people involved. Paul Rogers is right up there, but no mention of the CieAura Chief Science Officer. You can also see reports of a massive US Federal Trade Commission legal assault on a company called (perhaps somewhat grotesquely) BurnLounge, who were successfully prosecuted for operating a vast pyramid scheme. The previously mentioned infographic shows clearly how people involved in BurnLounge are linked to CieAura. BurnLounge was ordered to pay redress to 56,000 consumers of over 17 million dollars that it had bilked out of them, in a “scheme in which compensation for recruitment is unrelated to the sale of product to customers who are not participants”. The case was ruled in 2012. The FTC is still chasing the money.

WatchDog on RepSpace has also tracked down a great deal of CieAura material.

There’s a long thread over at Museum of Hoaxes that follows a lot of the ducking and weaving of CieAura. The numerous personnel links with other promoters of quackery such as the previously mentioned Lifewave and HarmonicFM are immediately obvious.

I found a CieAura press release that boasts that they have been granted registration by the Australian Therapeutic Drugs Administration enabling them to operate in Australia, but I have not been able to determine if that is in any way genuine, and if so if it is still current.
_________________________________________________________________________Footnotes:

It’s likely that the CieAura promoters tell their marks that they are forced to put up these disavowals because the CieAura chips are ‘ahead of their time’ and ‘conventional medicine doesn’t understand how they work’, or somesuch. At the very least, this shows an enormous disregard for the safety of consumers, but most likely they do it in full knowledge that the product is bunk and they’re simply protecting their asses. [↩]

I trawled through this ‘paper’. It should be a flagship for what science is NOT. You can find an ‘explanation’ of peer review buried deep in the CieAura site, for anyone who should care enough to go looking for it. If you understand peer review, and the manner in which rigorous medicine is practised, it’s VERY hard to believe that this single, obscure, nepotistic paper is not being contrived with one single purpose: to make it LOOK like CieAura has substance. It’s simply another dishonest ploy. [↩]

They frequently refer to their business as ‘network marketing’ but that is nothing more than a euphemism for pyramid scheme. [↩]

If you stop and think about it, the balance trick is not in anyway demonstrating that CieAura is delivering whatever efficacy it’s promising – it’s just a marketing technique. I mean seriously, on the face of it, it just looks like a hologram seems to stop you from toppling over. What does that even mean? The extrapolation to ‘it will make you better in bed’ or ‘it will stop your allergy problem’ is a ridiculous and oblique leap of logic. But of course, they’re not using the trick to appeal to the person who would is actually the proposed end user of the chips. [↩]

Probably in the form of admittance to seminars, access to ‘special’ online motivational material and so forth – I really don’t know in the case of CieAura, but it will be something like that. People who manage these pyramid or network-marketing schemes get familiar with the exponential nature of the beast very quickly, and so they’ve come up with all manner of novel ways with which to screw the suckers they’ve already hooked. [↩]

There’s a fair probability that in this case, the people who bought in might have done OK. It’s not hard to figure out why: at this early stage, they’re pretty close to the top of the pyramid. [↩]

It’s probable that this video was made for motivational purposes and is directed at CieAura reps. This raises another possibility: that the story (like much else about CieAura) is fictitious. The alternative – that it’s true, and not only did this pathetic episode happen in Rogers’ life, but he’s exhorting other people to behave like this – is all so shabby that it makes me want to retire from the human race. [↩]

18 Responses to “ In Gold We Trust ”

There have been four lovely instances of discussions on TCA helping someone make informed decisions that have improved their lives. After ten years of writing, those four things make everything worth it.

You were included in the four. For you, it was a difficult and substantial re-ordering of your world view, and though you fought it some, your willingness to think it through for yourself was what achieved success, not me. I think you’d already worked through some of it – you just needed a sounding board.

We have a pyramid-based remuneration system based on quantum returns. It does tend to make your bank account look like it’s receding into the negative, but that’s a holographic illusion due to refractive Doppler shift.

what is the balance trick ? And WD on the pencil in the glass of water, very effective.

‘and indeed, in order to help convince Brian how wonderful CieAura was, they even tried out the old balance trick on him – with which he was impressed until I told him how it was done’

iv.If you stop and think about it, the balance trick is not in anyway demonstrating that CieAura is delivering whatever efficacy it’s promising – it’s just a marketing technique. I mean seriously, on the face of it, it just looks like a hologram seems to stop you from toppling over. What does that even mean? The extrapolation to ‘it will make you better in bed’ or ‘it will stop your allergy problem’ is a ridiculous and oblique leap of logic. But of course, they’re not using the trick to appeal to the person who would is actually the proposed end user of the chips. [↩]

What I find odd is that people like Paul Rogers often consider themselves decent Christians. His father is a noted church beneficiary (as well as being in on the take, as you can see by the diagrams that relate him to CieAura). How do they do that? Are they completely blind to the hypocrisy? Do they think God will cut a special deal in their case? I just don’t know how to fathom it.